See the Bigger View
Submitted by Dale E. Lee
2022.04.27
As the field of Genealogy progresses, people are starting to realize that the view of the Family Tree we’ve been presented in the past is far too limited. Traditionally we could only see a few people at a time, even with a four or five generation chart.
Trackuback has come up with an innovative solution to that problem. They now have a way to display a traditional Pedigree chart with all ancestors at the same time. Their display allows you not only to see everyone, but to zoom in until you get to the individuals you wish to see and then click into the individual’s “card” to see their data. This means that traversal from one individual on one side of the tree to another person on the other side is far simpler than having to click many times to expand the view and eventually get to the person. Trackuback’s game development background has come in handy.
Not only does Trackuback allow for easy traversal, they also have gone to lengths to show historical context. Knowing context explains a lot about a person, the conditions they lived in, and where they might have gone during their lives. Trackuback’s tool allows you to pull up historical and battlefield maps and to overlay personal information on those maps. For example they have a geo coding tool that once run, allows you to visually view, in a color coded manner, where your ancestors came from. If viewing all ancestors at the same time, you can see different branches of the tree coming from different geographic locations, as shown by different colors. Additionally, after geo coding, individuals will be associated with world timelines to help understanding of the impact of world events on individual timelines.
Trackuback is a Swedish company and has received grants in Sweden for Innovative Startups. Their service is reasonable priced at $65.00 / yr. And they are continually implementing new innovations that both they and their subscribers have suggested. They also have videos to guide users through their technology and they offer a 4 day free trial to allow users to get comfortable with the software.
Though this is a great start, I’ll like to see them move toward a network diagram format with 3D zooming in the future, currently it is using the traditional 2D format. Also, I did not see any mention of a digitized record repository. But regardless, other companies have digitized records and you can download GEDCOM files from them and upload to Trackuback. Once done, you can use Trackuback for research to better understand where to look next.
To view Trackuback’s video presentations click into the following:
– RootsTech intro: https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/trackuback-overview
– Overview Videos: https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/speakers/trackuback/en
– Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/trackuback/
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